The best things about the Verbatim miniature disk drive are the size
and the “Ceedo” software.

The drive is about the size of a business card and weighs an ounce.
It's called the "Store 'n' Go USB HD Drive" and comes in 4 and 8-gigbyte
sizes. Prices run $100 and $160 from discount sellers listed at
www.verbatim.com. This is much
cheaper than the equivalent storage space on a flash or “thumb” drive.

The tiny Store 'n' Go hard drive comes with a short retractable USB
cable; you just pull it out and plug it into a Windows PC. When you do,
what they call a "launch pad" comes up on the screen. It looks just like
a small version of Windows. The first choice is "Start Ceedo." Do it.

Ceedo is a mini Windows environment. It comes with the common Windows
headings, like "All Programs," "My Documents," "My Pictures,” “My
Music,” etc. Outlook Express and Internet Explorer come pre-installed.
So does Microsoft Front Page, software for creating web sites. At the
bottom is a meter showing how much drive space is being used.

With the Ceedo software running, the tiny Store 'n' Go drive can be
considered your own portable computer. You can download applications and
use those with your own files just by plugging into another computer.
Whatever work you do will have no effect on the computer hosting your
little plug-in drive. On ejecting the drive, temporary files will be
automatically erased if you wish.

Ordinarily, the Ceedo program costs $40, from
ceedo.com , so it's something of a
nice deal that it comes on the Store 'n' Go drive. But it can be
purchased separately and loaded onto a flash drive or any other
auxiliary drive; it takes up about three megabytes. The beauty of that
is you can then carry your working environment with you and it's all
organized, including your mail box. Many of the applications you want to
use-- word processing, photo editing, instant messaging, Google Talk,
games, etc.-- can be loaded in and will work just as if they were on
whatever computer you plug into. We downloaded a free photo re-sizer and
stored 50 photos. Now we can click on “My Pictures” in the Ceedo
workspace and run an automatic slideshow wherever we plug it in.

This is not the only way to travel, however. Many portable
applications can be downloaded from the web without using Ceedo, or its
competitor, U3, which you can find at www.U3.com. The most important
would be "Open Office," which we've written about before and you can
read on our web site oncomp.com.
Open Office is pretty much like Microsoft Office except it's free.
Microsoft Office itself is not available as a portable app.

You can find 18 portable apps at
portableapps.com. They're all
free. If you use the Ceedo software and go to their web site:
ceedo.com , there are one hundred
portable apps that can be downloaded onto any Ceedo enabled drive. Many
of these are also free but some are not.

If you're not concerned much with price, high capacity “flash” drives
are currently available in 4-gigabyte and 8-gigabyte size. The advantage
of thumb drives is they are solid-state; they have no moving parts. That
means they are less susceptible to shock and may also hold their memory
for a longer time than disk drives.

Internuts

-- www.diynetwork.com
A do-it-yourself site for projects in eight categories: woodworking,
autos, boats, gardening, hobbies, home building, home improvement,
cooking and crafts. This is a commercial site from Scripps Networks and
draws millions of visitors a month. It has good information and you can
watch videos of each project as it's being done. The woodworking
projects even include a bill of materials.

-- www.freewebs.com A
hosting site like geocities.com. You can sign up for a free account and
host your web site here. They also provide tools for creating the web
site.

with Google or MSN and lets you know if the site you're visiting will
put spyware on your system. If it will, the image of a tiny insect
appears – a “bug.”

Scandoo also ranks sites according to acceptability. If the site is
informational and okay, it has a green check mark. A red "X" means
content in questionable taste, often pornography. A yellow marker means
Scandoo knows nothing about the site. This scan service is still in beta
so we didn't get red or green indicators on all the sites we visited,
but most of the time it worked fine.

Books

"Creative Computer Crafts: 50 fun and useful projects you can make
with any inkjet printer," by Marcelle Costanza; $25 from
www.nostarch.com.

Crafts are fun and the things you can make with your computer can
have personalized designs. This book has instructions for 50 projects,
like decorative bags, party favors, paper purses, custom clock faces,
candy bar wrappers, and even scratch-off tickets. There are full-size
templates for everything at the back of the book; very handy.

That's Entertainment

Two new games from Activision: "Over the Hedge," based on the
children's movie from Dreamworks, and "X-Men, the official game," based
on the adventures of the X-Men. Interestingly, both subjects were comic
strips or comic books before being made into movies. So now they've made
the full intra-media trip. Both are for the PC and game machines, best
prices will be found from discount web sites. Trailers are available at
www.activision.com.